The world is over and Delilah Rose won’t stop crying. We watch her from the shadows. Our world is all shadows now, all light filtered through thick-knitted clouds and the toothy holes of skyscrapers. Delilah Rose’s face is slick with tears. Still, her skin glows like a stovetop coil. In the roiling dark, we learn that years of retinol serums and elective surgeries will outlast electricity.

We track Delilah Rose with fascination, like a prized hunt. She is better known than most heads of state, with the complexion of a Caravaggio. When Jonah first saw her, hovering in the doorway, he nearly threw up. She was the girl from the magazines he stole from his sister’s room. The girl whose signature scent, Delilah’s Rose, he rubbed off the sample strip onto the soft inside of his wrist. When he lifted his arm, he’d felt like she was right there. And now she was. He thought it must be a sign that he was dead, and his father had been right: heaven is real. Jonah hated himself for doubting his father, for protesting Sunday mass. Heaven was real all along. Jonah has yet to speak to her. None of us have.

Our camp is in the dining room of an Olive Garden, a dozen shades of green, not one found in the wild. Sal was the first here. As the rest of us stumbled in—some doubled over in pain, others nearly mute—she welcomed us with stories of the Seven Summits. She only had two more climbs to go when the end came. “And I thought the Hillary Step was the worst it could get,” she said, shivering. From Sal, we learned about Everest. About the bodies under the snow, grasping for the peak. We also learned it was better to tune her out.

On the mezzanine of the Olive Garden, its driest point, we crouch around a nest of wooden chair legs. Sal has created fire. We are mesmerized by the dance of the flames, feel primal, experience ourselves devolving in real time. Smoke pools at our ankles before getting sucked upward through a blown-out skylight. In the heat of the fire, we discuss Delilah Rose.

“Marauders will love her. She’s a big fat target on our backs,” Jackie says. We roll our eyes at Jackie. She is fixated on marauders, has been preparing for this apocalypse since she first watched 28 Days Later in the cinema. It was a double feature with Delilah Rose’s breakout post-Disney hit. “What do you make of that?” Jackie said when she told us of this coincidence, her eyebrows joining her hairline.

“We should give her a chance,” Kemi says. “The children adore her. She’s an inspiration to them.” Ten-year-old Lucia is the only child alive. She has yet to emerge from under a table.

“Well, I hear she’s crazy,” Nicole says. “One of those stunted former child stars.” Nicole has remained faithful to Taylor Swift until the very end, until after the end. Kept awake by Delilah Rose’s whimpering, Nicole thinks, Tay would never have done this. It’s impossible to know what Tay would have done because she is almost certainly dead. How quickly we have lost hope! What was so recently unimaginable is now the only thing that’s real. Nicole likes to fantasize that there are others like us, out there somewhere, trying to reconstruct a life from the scooped-out core. In her dreams, Taylor Swift is with them, singing old country ditties.

“Who cares about some actress?” Lola says. “We need to focus on the future.” Lola is twenty weeks pregnant. The slope of her belly strains against the thin fabric of her shirt.

Jackie thumbs her temples. “What future? There’s nothing left.”

 

After the generators fail and the waters rise through the grates and a thousand dogs fill the streets, performing unspeakable acts we pray we will never have to do, we plaster every inch of the glass with newspaper. The windows now only show us the past.

“It’s better not to know,” Kemi says, flaying an old Chicago Sun-Times. At night, we hear Kemi counting in her sleep, a name for every number. One, Amadi; two, Bako; three, Ola. In the morning, she is the first to rise, scouring the cabinets for more newspaper.

There are ten of us, eleven counting Delilah Rose. Not everyone who arrived in the early days stayed, but the ones who did have decided to live. We have scavenged the food from the restaurant’s kitchens and guard it with a rotating group of two: one to guard, the other to guard the guarder. Alone, we cannot trust anyone, but together, we can trust everyone.

Nearly everyone. Delilah Rose has still not spoken a word, and she has started to molt. We find golden ringlets in piles around the camp like animal droppings. When Kemi comes upon the first lock, she alerts Frieda, a flat-faced young doctor. Frieda takes one look and, bless her training, identifies it as synthetic extensions. Soon, Delilah Rose is half-bald. The crying returns and no one, least of all Nicole, sleeps through the night.

“Should we do something about the poor girl?” Wally asks as we lie awake. Wally is old and uses this fact about himself to pretend he does not know who Delilah Rose is. He waves at her to hand him a can of pinto beans like she’s the checkout lady at Aldi. But his bony fingers, twisting like a nervous schoolboy, betray him. We suspect he had a granddaughter who grew up alongside Delilah Rose, collecting each album and morsel of trivia as if they were her own memories. But we know better than to ask him about his losses, just as we hope no one will ask us about ours.

“She’ll run out of steam eventually,” Sal says. “Reminds me of this lady at Denali base camp. Always crying herself to sleep about her dead husband.”

“I say we stay away from her,” Jackie says, ignoring Sal. “Her hair wasn’t even real. What else is she hiding?”

“You’re wrong.” Jonah’s voice is small in the dark. “She’s more real than any of us.”

The moaning dies down and is replaced by a thick, muggy silence. The sound of the dogs had been unbearable, but this penetrating quiet is worse. We hum ourselves to sleep and, in the morning, awake to dew licking the carpeted floor.

Everything is wet. “It’s the kind of wet that sticks to the bones,” Frieda says and we feel the dampness turning our insides to rot.

The smells follow soon after. Graeme, a medieval literature professor, is the only one to find this charming. “It’s like we’re serfs!” he says with a zeal that most of us have left in the last life. He spends the daylight hours reading the newspapered windows, searching for clues like they are treasure maps to an ancient civilization. “Where did it all go so spectacularly wrong?” Graeme says as he paces the dining room. He always comes back to either 9500 BC or 1980.

Even Delilah Rose no longer smells of berries. Yves Saint Lauren, we learn, is not as moisture-wicking as our Old Navy and Gap. We give her a wide berth, better only to look from afar, without being confronted by her sweat glands.

We know, down to the hour, how much food and potable water is left. We know that in sixty-two hours we will need to go outside but no one—not Lola, not Jackie, not even Sal—is eager to go. We would rather tune into Delilah Rose. When we watch her from across the camp, we tell ourselves that she is playing a character. She is the heroine in Spy Mom, the Cold War drama that bombed in the box office. Only Jonah has seen it, and even he admits it wasn’t her best work. Her face, no longer smooth, is still sculpted enough that she can’t fully disappear into the role of covert CIA operative. Through her, we imagine that we are watching our predicament from a plush theater seat, a tub of popcorn in our laps. The salt kisses our lips and we close our eyes. She is our girlhood slumber party, our rebellious youth, our children’s Halloween costumes, our art school film classes, our first kiss. She is a reminder of a world we want to crush like a bug with our shoes, even as we mourn the bug’s violent death. If only we could keep the bug alive, we cry, as we press our heels down hard.

 

Forty-six hours before we will run out of food, Delilah Rose emerges from her corner.

“Hey,” she says. We are surprised by the softness of her voice. Intimate interviews, the camera inches from her face, never captured the timbre. Honeyed like a lullaby, like springtime.

Jonah scrambles to the front. “Hi,” he says, biting his tongue to keep himself from saying her full name.

“I’m sorry I’ve been a little, you know—” She brushes her fingers through her hair, cringes at how little she finds. “Out of it.”

Jonah nods, hands on his heart. “We’ve all been a little out of it.” He gestures at the rest of us who are standing stock-still, staring at her. Only Wally looks away, out of disinterest or deference.

“My mother would know exactly what to say in a moment like this,” she says. “Before I was her full-time job, she was a waitress. She could talk to anyone.” Her sweater is draped over her shoulders, but we can see the cuts and bruises cascading down her forearms. Even her bruises are too defined, too perfect, like stage makeup. “I’m so glad we’re in this together,” she says in her honey voice.

“Are you hungry?” Jonah hands her the last chunk of stale bread.

“Starving,” she says, grabbing the bread. After three graceful bites, she pauses. “You say that so many times, I’m starving, and you never think about what it means. To be actually starving.” She laughs, teeth milk white, and we feel ourselves smiling back.

Jonah looks like he would float away if he weren’t tethered by gravity. “Literally same, Delilah Rose,” he says, punctuating each syllable of her name like the song that’s played on a loop in our heads since the moment she arrived. Delilah Rose, Delilah Rose, how do I get you out these clothes. We catch each other humming it absently, that earworm of a song. Delilah Rose’s lawyers took the singer to court, demanding exactly one dollar in compensatory damages. After she won the lawsuit, she posted a picture of the bill with the caption: poetic justice is (almost) free.

Jonah scrunches up his face. This moment with her could slip through his fingers as fast as the world had; he needs to make it count. “I just want you to know, you make me feel like I matter,” he says.

Delilah Rose beams at Jonah, holds out her hand. “Oh, you’re such a sweetheart,” she says. “You make me feel the exact same way.”

 

We each find our way to her. When we are with her, we do not notice the gnawing fist of hunger pressing up against our bellies. So we give Delilah Rose an extra helping and follow her back in time: to Robert De Niro’s post-Oscars pool party; to her wild years, traveling in a pack of undernourished models, flipping the bird at every photographer; to the mind of little Delilah Rose, who once wrote a screenplay about a traveling circus where the lion and the lion tamer fall in love.

“I was a weird kid,” Delilah Rose says. “But when you have no friends, no one’s telling you what you can’t do.” Little Lucia comes out from hiding and curls around her, clutching her like a teddy bear. Wally sits beside them, smiling absently.

Frieda asks Delilah Rose to perform her monologue from New York Goodbye. When she gets to the famous line about the slippage of time, Frieda crumples into heaving sobs. Through the tears, Frieda smiles for the first time since she arrived and says, “Oh, that part always gets me.”

Kemi once ran a nonprofit for girls’ education and wants to talk about her empowerment work. Delilah Rose listens, shaking her head somberly. When it’s her turn, Delilah Rose says, “and it’s no better for women in Hollywood. They’ll eat you alive.” As she speaks, she slides her finger along one of the last cans of beans, the aquafaba thick like mucus. We close our eyes, listening to her chew, and can almost feel the food in our own mouths.

Even Nicole is smitten. Delilah Rose tells her stories of Taylor Swift—“the nicest woman in the business”—and Nicole feels as if she’s met the sister of her long-dead best friend. A twin onto whom she can transfer her love, a vessel in which her love can grow.

At night, while Delilah Rose sleeps on a pillow Frieda found for her in the storage closet, we tiptoe back into our own memories. The soft plane of skin on the inside of our son’s left arm. Marbled light quivering on the surface of a pool. Under a quilt, illuminated by flashlight: the lush opening of Anne of Green Gables. Memories, like flint, that spark thoughts of the future again. It tastes like honey.

 

Despite our conservation efforts, the food is gone. Delilah Rose sings to us around the fire. Ella Fitzgerald, Sam Cooke, John Lennon—all of whom, we are grateful to realize, were dead even before the end. Come morning, some of us will have to lift up the barricade on the doors and venture out into the world. We bite our nails, the only protein left in the room, and wait.

Wally jolts us. “I will go,” he says and, over our groans of protest, “I’m off my heart medication. I won’t last much longer anyways.” He is the eldest, our closest link to an ancestor. Lucia squeezes his hand and he begins to cry, quietly in the dim light of the fire.

“I’ll go with you,” Sal says. “I can handle whatever’s out there.” To this, we do not protest. We’ve been waiting for Sal to volunteer herself for days.

“Of course, I would go, if it weren’t for…” Lola points at her swollen belly.

Graeme clears his throat. “You know, the peasants who survived the Black Death actually did quite well for themselves. With all the lords dead, they got their own plot of land, had a chance to make a real living.”

“Not really the time for a history lesson, professor,” Lola says.

“Sorry,” he mutters. “I just wanted to say that people have survived the end before and something unexpected came out of it.”

We look at Delilah Rose, made cherubic by the fire’s glow. She hasn’t been this quiet since her first days at the camp, before she offered herself to us. “You are so worldly, dear,” Kemi says to her. “Tell us, what should we do?”

For a minute, she seems to ponder Kemi’s question. Then, she says, “My mother was a waitress.” She looks out into the dark, and we follow her gaze. There is nothing there.

“You said,” Jackie says.

“She would’ve known just what to say.” Delilah Rose shuffles to her feet. In the low-burning flames, we see her as if through a funhouse mirror, strangely bloated in the face and middle. She looks like someone we used to know, a name on the tip of our tongues. “Listen, you guys get started without me. I’ll be right back.” She melts into the deep recesses of the room and does not return.

Lola leans forward, her nose nearly kissing the embers, and says, “Maybe she just forgot her lines.”

The fire sputters then dies. In the morning, Wally, Sal, and—to our surprise—Graeme are gone.

 

What is more unbearable: the hunger or the waiting? The hours drip while Delilah Rose sings. She gets caught in a melody, the same bar of a jazz standard buffering like a scratched record.

“Do you know any other god damn songs?” Lola shouts from her corner. Delilah Rose’s voice cracks but she does not stop.

Jonah leans over to her, whispers, “You know I think you have a beautiful voice, but maybe a break would be good for everyone?”

And still, Delilah Rose does not stop. She smiles at Jonah, her cheeks pink and full. “Music is food for the soul,” she croons, a line that might be Shakespeare or an ad for surround-sound speakers.

Days pass and Wally, Sal, and Graeme do not return. We stop jumping every time we hear a creak near the door. We need to conserve our energy. The hole in our belly expands and we learn new words for our hunger. We know that the longer we wait to leave, the harder it will be to survive whatever is out there. And yet, we cannot seem to move.

One morning, we awake to find that Jackie and Lola’s corners are empty. For a moment, we imagine them trudging through the streets, bickering about which direction to go. Then, we see them through the gap between the serving station and the kitchen.

It unsettles us, seeing them apart. It reminds us of how we almost didn’t survive—not the initial apocalypse, we weren’t so lucky to die quickly—but what came after. In those early days, we didn’t bother learning names. The lights flickered on and off, and it felt like the old world was still hanging on, could swing back at us at any moment like a wrecking ball. In the frenzy, we heard a scream echoing from the back kitchens. It hung in the air, bloodless, until a streak of color rushed the dining room. The streak waved a knife in the air, all red. It took eight of us to drive it away. After that, we closed off the back kitchen, decided it would be easier to trust each other if we were always in view. The breathing settled in the room. We said hello.

But now Jackie and Lola are hunched over behind a pair of green saloon doors. Their hands bump against the doors as they speak. With each rattle, we wish it was another door opening, and we’d see our missing return, the three whose names we so recently did not know. They’d have a bounty of fresh vegetables or, hell, even another can of beans. A future for us.

Jackie beckons to Frieda to join them in the kitchen. Except for the brief moment watching Delilah Rose’s performance, Frieda has remained stoic. Years of medical training turned her face to stone. But as we watch her from afar, her face begins to slacken, like every cell has unfastened itself from one another. Her eyes, mouth, nostrils all droop.

We hear Frieda say, “but think of all the chemicals…”

“You’ve got any better ideas, doctor?” Jackie lets out a deep, acrid breath. Frieda is silent. By the time she reenters the dining room, she’s buckled her face back up. She looks at us with a doctor’s gaze, cool and impassive.

One by one, each of us is brought into the kitchen. Jackie pushes her shoulders back, conjuring her past life as a DMV attendant. She delights in her authority, at how our necks bend to listen to her plans. Lola stands back. Although we listen to Jackie, we watch Lola. The twitch of her dark eyes, the tightness of her lips. We know from looking at her that this was all her idea, but now that it is becoming real, she is shrinking from her power. She is not yet thirty.

“We need to prepare for the worst,” Jackie says. “We won’t survive without it.”

Lola is still, barely nodding. Behind her hang an array of kitchen utensils, dull silver, sharp edges.

“Look,” Jackie continues like we’re arguing with her over an unpaid parking ticket. “She’s dead weight at this point. What else can she give us?”

We turn to Lola. “This is our chance,” she says softly.

When Kemi meets with them, she asks, “How are you going to tell Jonah?” She looks across the room at him, still on the edge of boyhood, his knees pulled up to his chest.

“I think he already knows,” Lola says, following Kemi’s gaze. For the first time, Lola looks like a mother.

Jonah does know. While the rest of us have our turns in the kitchen, he watches Delilah Rose as she sleeps. Her face against the pillow, hair tousled. From a distance, she still looks like the girl from his sister’s magazines. She had made him feel like he could be anything. He waits until Jackie and Lola are alone again in the kitchen. Then he stands and walks over to the saloon doors, pushing them open like a cowboy looking for a fight.

“I’ll do it,” he says. “Let me do it.”

Jackie opens her mouth to speak, but Lola is quicker. “Of course,” she says. She hands him the knife.

Jonah approaches Delilah Rose in her corner. “Sweetheart,” she says as he gets close. “Tell me you found more food hidden away somewhere.” His lips turn up into an almost-smile, the hint of teeth below. Kemi presses her hand over Lucia’s eyes.

When Delilah Rose sees the knife, she recoils. “Jonah, it’s me,” she says. Her blue-green eyes flash with terror. “Did I ever tell you about Bob’s party? After the Oscars?”

Across the room, a sheet of the newspaper unsticks itself from the window, flutters to the ground. Through the glass, a slice of sun cuts right through the room, illuminates her face like a spotlight. Even now, she does not look real. Her face unfurls in agony, although he has not yet touched her. She could never quite hit her marks.

Jonah towers over her, lifts his arm. When it is done, we descend like dogs upon her.

 

Before Delilah was a star, she was a little girl with an overprotective mother. After playing in the rain, she caught a fever—101, 103, 104, with each retelling the degrees change. Her mother lectured her about her carelessness, how her preoccupation with fantasy would one day be the death of her. For a week, the fever did not abate, and soon she was bedbound. Darkness washed over her and five days passed before she came to.

“My mother said later that she saw the life leave my body. She was sure I was gone,” Delilah has said on talk shows over the years. When she spoke, the host’s eyes were always wide with horror, as if they were unsure still whether or not she survived. “When I woke up, my mother was crying. And do you know what she said to me?” The host would shake their head.

“She said, now you must live twice. I didn’t know what she meant then, I was too young. But now I do. I’m supposed to live my life once for myself and once for the world. I owe everything to you.” The last words, Delilah always said straight to camera: her blue-green eyes seeing past the sound stage, past the artifice and into our little lives. We believed her then. We still do.